Gentle The Stars And The Town Asleep Poem by Patrick White

Gentle the stars and the town asleep.
No stranger at the gate. No door ajar.
The windows deep in their own affairs.
Flowers thicken the hot night air
with pheromones of sex and death
that follow you all the way down the street
like homeless kittens and lonely junkies.

Walking my solitude off alone,
the cold stone of the moon overhead,
the first night bird I've heard tonight
singing high in the leaves of an elm
strung like a guitar with power lines
and in my heart, a child of longing,
the half-finished spectre of a poem to you.

The streetlamps bud like day lilies
but nothing blooms in the tungsten light
though insects gather in impotent frenzies,
my poem to you makes love through its eyes
to the leaf and the star and the stone
seeking out images of you to adorn
this figment of desire in a shrine of thorns.

A woman dreams in a house far away.
The road grows darker and longer
out among the fields where the stars
wax brighter than the themes of a poet
igniting like fireflies down by the river
he sits by nursing his imagination
on the night shift of the inconceivable.